Keyword analyses of English charter parties

Abstract

In the present study, based on a self-built corpus of English charter parties, keyword analyses are conducted using two methods: a traditional corpus frequency keyword analysis and a text dispersion keyword analysis recently proposed by Egbert and Biber (2019). The results show that both keyword analyses could reveal some aspects of the textual features of English charter party documents. Keyword lists generated by the two methods contain different keywords as well as shared ones. Despite the differences between the two lists, a majority of the keywords are strongly associated with the target domain of maritime documents. Each of the two keyword lists carries its own merits. We recommend a combination of the frequency-based method and the dispersion-based method for analyzing a specialized corpus to develop a consolidated keyword list.